Sometimes I just want to smack the oldbie crank commenters on NWN.

Really. @#$# oldbie cranks with axes to grind! What's funny is that I'm one of them too!

NWN Deathwatch post on Firefly RP sim

RP sim's aren't viable long term, no, not even with cheaper tier some of the oldbie cranks go on about, because when they lose their "funding angel" they go down it's that simple. They simply DO NOT PAY FOR THEMSELVES RP groups really ought to start charging fees to enter their land and fees to support their groups, donations aren't going to cut it if the "funding angel" has a bad year and needs to cut back or gets bored with SL, or annoyed with the Drama of RP groups. The tools do support access fees you know.

Let me quote Iggy here:

It's one sim. But that is how it starts. If LL loses its RPers, its over. They've already lost the business world. The educators and nonprofits are seeping away.

Oh Iggy, the hardcore RP community in SL is miniscule. the clubgoing howlzers outnumber them 10 to 1 at least, even in the old days hardcore RP was a niche.

For all the fashionista angst over mesh doo-dads and the right eyeshadow, I'd wager that there's not enough XXX and play-Barbie customer base out there to keep the Lab open.

Oh Iggy, you're like those Slashdotters that think everyone thinks like them and wants to spend lots of time tweaking/building and messing with computers rather than just buying something that works without fiddling. You know the ones, who t hink that because their nerd games like Eve Online are 90% male, that SL is as well. They're the ones who keep that "there are no women on the internet" meme going.

But, Iggy, The Barbie girls...they outnumber you and the people like you by a HUGE margin. Haven't you SEEN the HUGE number of SL fashion blogs? Do you not realize that avatar appearance enhancements, drive the SL economy? In other words, the Fashionistas basically run SL behind the scenes. They have for quite a while now. They're the ones spending the money. Skin Fair? Hair Fair? Sin Fair? Fashion for Life? Vintage Fair? Fantasy Fair?

There's tons of old fashionista centric regions STILL going strong. Because unlike college students popping into SL for a class project, or Open source obsessed nerds who buy their furry avatar to make a statement against the "Barbies" (and also say how they didn't have to pay for their furry form on opensim because it was "free") and then spend the rest of the time building Battlemechs or starfighters in sandboxes, fashionfolk spend money. A LOT of money. Look, Iggy, read these posts by Salome Strangelove, that'll help you understand I think:

Post about being a girloholic

about misogyny and denigration of fashion play

The real reason some of the cranks exist is...the hardcore builder/scripter nerds aren't the center of SL anymore, LL doesn't need to cater to them like it used to. I'm lucky, while I'm a nerd, being a fashionista means that I don't feel as alienated from modern SL culture as folks like Orca Flotta or Shockwave Yareach or foneco Zuzu seem to be. Once there were quick build contests, and everyone driving around in vehicles, and hanging out in the nerdy places the "builder/scripter" crowd enjoyed. But not anymore. Now there's voice, not just text and there's a horde of 25-45 year old women going around SL, and they tend to not go to Aerodromes or space museums.

I think that folks like Orca, Shockwave, etc, kind of feel betrayed, like SL turned it's back on them...they helped build it, they were the pioneers and now it's "fine fine, you helped kickstart SL, but we don't need you so much anymore, now shut up about sim crossings, only the cult of the vehicle and a few steamlanders really care about that, everyone else TP's everywhere so it's not our #1 priority so just be quiet and go back to fiddling with your vehicles in your vanity sims that you basically use as sandboxes." You can see it in how Orca and the others talk about "The masses" and how they feel ignored. They don't want new users...they want to go back the way it was, when people like them were a larger portion of the SL userbase.

But deep down they know SL needs new users and they resent it, and it makes them oldbie cranks...grid love em. Now they spend a lot of time bragging up opensim...which is nerd centric like the old SL...not very many Barbies at all there. But what they don't understand is that the most important part of SL isn't the prims or the scripting or all the things the builder/scripter crowd holds up as the greatest things in the universe....it's the people. And opensim is going nowhere without people. Sure the nerds love it, but it's not going to grow beyond them, and the educators who want a cheap region to bring a few students in, without the Barbies those people dislike. No currency, no shoes, no people, it's that simple. And while there are some opensim based worlds that DO have currency, why would I go to one of those Tiny little markets when SL is so HUGE. Those places are just SL...without the community. They're going nowhere, because ultimately, they depend so much on SL that they ARE SL, under different names. They're SL for people who want to say "Fuck You" to LL for various reasons (too many barbies, region pricing, ignoring sim crossings), without actually giving up SL.

So there you have it, a rant from an oldbie crank...ME, about OTHER oldbie cranks. I understand "why" they write what they do, and I feel for them, even if I don't agree with them.

By the way, Pussycat Catnap is easily the most commonsensical voice of reason commenter on NWN these days. Well worth reading.

My "issues" with New World Notes

New World Notes is one of the oldest and well respected SL blogs. It's founder, Hamlet Au, was once Hamlet Linden, Linden Lab's own embedded reporter in SL. I heartily recommend it to people and read it myself daily.

However...I have issues with NWN and have apparently have been blocked from commenting there. That disappoints me, though I can understand why.

I probably mentioned Hamlet's indirect financial relationship with Facebook a few too many times when Hamlet kept flogging Facebook as the be all of what SL should be more like. He consults for a company that uses Facebook for game logins and thusly, indirectly financially benefits from it. I was a bit perturbed that he did not mention that connection earlier in his promotion of SL becoming more like Faceook, unlike his Blue Mars thing, which he was quite open about.

My issues with NWN are as follows:

1. Hamlet lives in the tech journalist bubble in California and is thusly disconnected from "average people". This in part led to my disagreement with him about the future of Blue Mars, because while he probably knows people who upgrade their computers often and buy a new iPhone whenever it comes out, that's not the case amongst the SL userbase. He simply didn't understand that Blue Mars had no future as a desktop virtual world with it's Cryengine based graphics when the mass market "Marts" of the US have machines on their shelves with integrated Nvidia 6150SE's in them.

2. Hamlet talks to much to the people behind virtual worlds, when it's the USERS who are the important people...without users, the worlds cannot survive. That also leads to him being a sucker for buzzwords like "the cloud" He thought that "the cloud" would save blue mars, that it wouldn't matter that all those housewives in SL had low end integrated chipsets on their PC's, that BM would be rendered in the cloud and displayed locally.....dumbest thing I ever heard. They didn't have the money! or the number of users to justify doing it. They'd have needed to start on that years ago, and they ran out of time.

3. Hamlet is guilty of the "if it's popular it must be good and anything that wants to become popular should be more like that" fallacy. That's the Facebook thing. Facebook sucks...it truly does. It's interface, it's privacy tools, the requests for "facebook aps" to do things to your info. But Hamlet thinks that because it's popular SL should be more like it, or become connected to it. That's kind of like the people who say smartphones should be like the iPhone, when the iPhone might not be the best device for someones needs. Facebook is all about real world identities and SL...is not. Hamlet says that SL users could use facebook to learn about events in world which tells me that:

4. Hamlet doesn't spend enough time in world talking to "the masses" in world. If he did, he wouldn't say half the stuff he does about SL users. Why use facebook for event listings when there's google calendar and SL's own group system....that he doesn't use effectively. Go on, check the NWN group...no notices...and the group is assigned land that is not covered by Tier:

More Land Credits are needed to support the Land in use."

That picture above was taken at the NWN headquarters location in Waterhead...his building is gone and his furniture and pot plants are just floating in mid air. The man really needs to spend more time in world doing the things that other SL users do, like maintain their land and socialize and stuff. You may not believe it, but in the old days, NWN actually sponsored events in-world!

Another thing that leads me to believe that Hamlet isn't as connected to the masses of SL users as he ought to be is his avatar appearance. Most avatars, even male ones that don't shop much...update their appearance quite a bit. Could you imagine a female SL blogger looking like she just stepped out of 2006? No. Sure, Hamlet's a guy, and a tech journalist and doesn't himself cover SL fashion, leaving that to Iris, but still. DJ's shop, Land Baron's shop, content makers shop. Shopping, especially of things related to avatar appearance, drives the SL economy.

5. He doesn't talk about the SL economy as much as he did in the past. That's hurting SL more than anything. It isn't sim crossings or group chat problems that really hurts SL, but people NOT spending L$.

6. Hamlet doesn't get that SL is a niche product, like hex based strategy games and roguelikes are. The same applies to Minecraft. Sure it's a lot of buzz, but it's coming from hard core nerds who love that sort of crazy complex stuff.

7. The core SL user is probably a 30-50 year old woman...but Hamlet rarely talks to them and would rather talk with Ex-Lindens starting up micro-worlds based on SL code that are going to go nowhere without content that will attract those 30-50 year old women. No pretty shoes, big hair, sexy dresses to make their avatar look kardashiany? They aren't going to be there.

8. Hamlet doesn't realize that NWN is a bubble itself. He's not getting true feedback on
how the masses see and feel about SL via the comments on NWN because NWN's readers are oldbies, FIC and near FIC. Almost all a part of what calls the 100000 That's a problem because the things they care about sometimes don't matter to the "masses" of SL. There's folks in SL who don't give a damn about group chat...and there's plenty of people who simply don't cross sim borders...they d on't need to. In fact, I tend to only cross borders in the steamlands! Everywhere else, I TP.

So that's pretty much it. It's not that I dislike Hamlet or NWN, since it's still a great source of information, it's just that Hamlet needs to be more "grounded" like he used to be.

RFL experience, not so good.

I posted this in a comment on New World Notes in response to a question on how the RFL could try to raise US $500000 next year.


Having a big event over a long period of time is a standard tactic for SL, but that goes against the "a RFL event is 24 hours" tradition that comes from RL. Well they'll have to get over that, because SL is not RL.

Which leads me to the fact that in RL you can have people along side the track cheering on survivors and caregivers and walkers, but that doesn't work very well in SL. Those Avilion folks in Tree of Life meant well, but they were making things worse! Somebody should have ejected most of them.

Having the track double back or overpass itself through sims was a bad bad bad idea because it increased the number of avatars in a region. That's what killed Overcome, because you had a bunch of spectators at the track that passed through the Northern edge of Overcome. Besides those walking through the southern part. I never did complete the Survivor-Caregiver lap because Overcome took down SL three times. Support, Remember and Stride were also bad. it took me 10 hours to do 4.46 laps!

They should have kept the camp and build sims away from the track. I remember in 2006 how you had to walk quite a bit to get to camps to visit RFL vendors, while this year you could spot vendors right from the track. Bad idea, which also made it harder for those who didn't want to walk but just wanted to get some of those RFL specific releases.

In past relays the relay regions stayed up for days or weeks after so that people could go in and explore all the neat builds and shop at the vendors and donate yet more L$ to the kiosks. This year, no dice. They're taking them down today!

If you go here: http://slrfl.maintree.com/

You can compare the # of avatars participating and the laps/distance traveled. 2008 was king, participation wise. The track was shorter, meaning that it's easier to do for those who don't want to spend over 2 hours trudging their way through, and it was better designed. I bet the 2009 might have had better participation without the major lag. I'm talking worse than an old Dazzle LE event. I figure some people popped in, found out they couldn't move well or see, and popped right back out. It was so bad in some places that you couldn't TP out, you had to quit SL and then come in at your home point.

If you take a look at the top 15 walkers you'll notice that 7 of them are from Team Caledon, and even they/us were crashing. I know a few of us got stuck in regions that were were moving as slow as treacle in while they were rebooting. It's only people who were that dedicated to the cause who were willing to put up with the overall experience.

The RFL sent Survivors and Caregivers a survey link.


I came back to the RFL to start my laps at 2am my time on SLunday. Being less busy, it was at least tolerable then but got worse later on in my stint as others started showing back up. I also figured that if His Grace Viderian Vollmar of Cymru in Caledon could do it, I could too.

The camaraderie was great though in the Team Caledon chat and in the ISC chat too. I even got a picture of Guvnah Shang at the end of the Relay. The man doesn't stay still often enough for me
to get one!

Kanomi Pikajuna

Kanomi is important. Kanomi is special. Kanomi matters. She is the friend to all. Everybody likes her. Everybody likes the nice girl who is the friend to all. She is nice and important and special and important and she is the nice special important friend to all! Kanomi is important. Kanomi matters.

She's covering the SL gaming scene for Hamlet Au over at New World Notes, replacing Miss Vidal Tripsa. She's Caledonian too.

Six degrees of separation.

I've been seeing a LOT of familiar faces and names in Hamlet Au's New World Notes lately as subjects of posts, contributors and commenters, and it got me thinking

Here are some of the names I've seen recently:

Crap Mariner
Vidal Tripsa
Phineas Messmer
Zoe Connolly
Eladrienne Laval
Charlanna Beresford
Iris Ophelia
Kit Meredith

I know them all. Lanna and Iris contribute to NWN and they're in my friends list. Phineas, Zoe and Eladrienne are Caledonians and I see Miss Laval and Miss Connolly frequently. Miss Tripsa I met in Extropia, before she got mentioned on NWN. Turns out she hangs in Caledon too. I can't remember where I met Crap, sorry Crap. Kit I met at a Metro Models show, and she and I both worked for Linden Lifestyles as did Iris.

Some might be thinking "Hey, they're really is an insular clique of the famous people" A "FIC" (Feted Inner Core) if you will. Not that I agree with the concept of the FIC, created by Prokofy Neva (Yes, there are people from various parts of the FIClist in my Friends list)

I think the FIC concept is too limiting. IMHO there's a more generalized "avatars of influence" group that's much larger. It would include the formal and informal SL press (bloggers and the like), those who post/comment a lot on blogs/forums, a lot of content creators, etc. It's too large of a group for any individual to have major influence. In fact, SL is so big these days that there's not much Fete-ing of anyone by Linden Labs Everyone is becoming a smaller fish in a bigger pond. Ask new folk who Anshe or Aimee are. They'll say Anshe who? Aimee who?

Places like NCI, the Shelter or BareRose, or Caledon as a whole, are far far more influential than individuals these days.

Even in the SL fashion world, individuals are becoming less influential. Are the folks at Second Style as influential as they were back in 2006 when I joined? I don't know. Or consider the skin glut, seems like everybody has a skin line these days.

And by the way, I'm D-List at best. :-)